CONCLUSION: HOW CAN PARTICIPATORY INTERVENTIONS BE IMPROVED?
infrastructure, skills training, private transfers, and credit, in addition to “community mobilization.” Most recently, such projects have also morphed into community livelihood projects, which, as their name suggests, focus greater attention on expanding opportunities for sustainable livelihoods for the poor through the promotion of participatory mechanisms for expanding access to markets, investing in communal assets, and building market linkages. Decentralization refers to efforts to strengthen village and municipal governments on both the demand and supply sides. On the demand side, decentralization strengthens citizens’ participation in local government by, for example, instituting regular elections, improving access to information, and fostering mechanisms for deliberative decision making. On the supply side, decentralization aims to enhance the ability of local governments to provide services by increasing their financial resources, strengthening the capacity of local officials and streamlining and rationalizing their administrative functions. As this report is about participatory development, the decentralization evidence focuses on the demand side.2 This report builds a conceptual framework for thinking about when and how to induce participation that is structured around the idea of “civil society failure.” Markets and governments are now widely recognized as subject to failure. Yet the policy literature, particularly at the local level, is rife with solutions to market and government failures that assume that groups of people (village communities, urban neighborhood associations, school councils, water user groups) will always work toward a common interest. Rarely is much thought explicitly given to the possibility of civil society failure—the possibility that communities, however constituted, may also face significant problems of coordination, asymmetric information, and inequality, which may limit their ability to respond to and resolve market and government failures.3 Development policy related to participatory processes needs to be informed by a thoughtful diagnosis of potential civil society failure and its interaction with market and government failures. Such an analysis is necessary for developing a clearer understanding of the tradeoffs involved in moving decisions to local communities, in each context. It is also necessary for identifying the avenues that any given project or policy provides to rectify or repair specific civil society failures. The report reviews more than 500 empirical studies of participatory development interventions to address issues of central interest to policy makers. These issues include the following:
Markets and governments are now widely recognized as subject to failure . . . . . . but civic groups are often (erroneously) assumed to always work toward a common interest.
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